Abstract
Inheritance of the shovel trait in the maxillary central incisor was investigated on the basis of the casts obtained from 41 Japanese families. The trait was expressed in terms of the depth of the lingual fossa, and statistically treated as a continuous character that showed normal distribution curve. Studies on twins showed very strong control of genes on this character. The heritability was also found to be very high among family members. It is suggested that further investigations should be undertaken to prove if this trait partly linked with the sex chromosomes.
